When creationists want to awe a credulous audience, preferably one in a church with limited education, they employ a variety of methods. One method is by trotting out one credentialed person to impress the audience with the fact that they have a Ph.D. or some other advanced degree; the person in question is usually old and may not even be a scientist, but they wave their doctorate around as though it makes them qualified to speak on DNA or geology. Often this scientist, generally well-spoken, employs another favored method in support of their rickety case. They will bring forth a natural process and say that if it is true, then the earth could not possibly be older than six thousand years because the phenomena would not exist as it currently does. One such example comes to us courtesy of the Creation Moments organization, which provides daily broadcasts of some example or another that either purports to “disprove” evolution or shed light on the glory of Creation as they see it. In a broadcast recorded as “Simple Math, Hard Questions,” the anonymous author states that, given the rate of erosion, the earth cannot possibly be old, for the mountains would have long ago worn down into nothing.
They begin by asserting that “evolutionists” believe things that modern scientists simply do not believe, proceed to skewer this straw man and then shake their heads that anyone can believe this notion. The problem is, of course, that no one does. What they assert simply isn’t true. They say that “we are also told that the last mountain building activity took place about 65 million years ago.” Who in the world told them that? The Himalayas are a relatively recent mountain range, in the scale of geological time, the result of the collision of the Indian sub-continent with the rest of Asia. They are still rising! By contrast, the Appalachian Mountains of the Eastern United States stopped rising a long time ago, and have greatly eroded since their peak. The notion that, as the young-earth creationists assert, given the rate of erosion, all the continents should have worn down to sea level after 14 million years only makes sense to the creationist. No “evolutionist”--or perhaps we should say “sane scientist”--would agree with some of the propositions the creationist attributes to him. In the creationist mind the world is stable. Organisms don’t evolve; they exist much as they always did. In the creationist mind (unless they’re called upon to do some mental gymnastics to justify Noah’s Flood as possible), the continents are pretty much as they’ve always been.
The problem, at least for the creationist, is that the world is not stable, it is dynamic! Organisms evolve, continents move, islands form, mountains rise and erode away over the course of earth’s roughly 4.5 billion years of existence. Creationists can only make their bizarre scenarios sound plausible in contrast to the evolutionary straw-men that they themselves have cut out of whole cloth. The math may be “simple”, but the questions are inane.
Buzzinga
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